Friday, 25 March 2011

The Crusader Project begins!

They say variety is the spice of life, well I have to say I'm pretty damn bored of painting standard marines. It was a good run, got a fair few done however I need a break and as such its time to paint my first ever Blood Angels tank my Land raider crusader with Forgeworld doors.

Having never painted a Blood Angels tank before it could be said starting with an expensive Forgeworld LRC is a bit stupid and like jumping in at the deep end. Why not do a razorback you moron I may hear you saying, well its a fair point, but the reason is its not nearly as interesting or as cool a model and where I don't really like Land Raiders in the actual game, its an extremely cool unit to look at, nothing says bad ass tank like a Land Raider.

So onto part one and first of all I would like to say to anyone reading this if you have experience painting tanks or blood angels tanks especially, feel free to comment, any help in completing this is welcome.

To begin with I gave the Land Raider a spray undercoat of army painter pure red, its what I use on the marines so figured it would do a good enough job. After this was dry I moved onto the black (guns, grenade launchers, tracks, smoke launchers etc) and deneb stone sections (skulls, blood angel bits, wings etc).

Here are the pics so far -

Now this bit is complete the next stage will be to give the whole thing a wash with badab black getting into all the cracks and bringing out the detail on this fantastic model, after this its time to do the silver over the black sections before going over most of the model with blood red to tidy it up, that's coming soon!

As you can see from the pic the unit I am thinking of using inside the LRC is a 5 man Terminator squad with 2 Thunderhammer/stormshields and 3 with lightning claws. This will be combined with either a standard priest who stays in the tank or perhaps a Terminator Librarian who I am looking forward to converting once the grey knights come out and I can make a decent plastic one.

The only real issue I can see with this unit after studying it a fair bit is what powers to take, my initial thoughts were Rage (because it worked fantastically in 10 man assault squads, re-roll misses rocks) and something completely unrelated due to him being only able to cast one power per player turn, such as fear of darkness (something you would cast from range that to try and get a cheeky run away) or Lance (situational for times when there are vehicles lined up and charging will do less damage than the lance) but I am certainly open to suggestions on this one.

Allot of people tend to get the same results here with a Reclusiarch but I really don't like how you only get re-rolls when you charge, plus the librarian can take a storm shield and is still cheaper than the pimp chaplain.